Steve Ozanich’s The Great Pain Deception – Chapter FourChasing the Changes – A Time for Reflection

This chapter is full of great advice on healing TMS pain. It focuses largely on triggers that set off repressed emotions that cause TMS pain.

Steve says triggers result from both conditioning and suggestion. We tend to think something is physically wrong if we hear a popping sound in our body. I’ve heard that when I’ve sprained an ankle. That’s a conditioned response to the pain. Steve suggests that in those cases when we feel pain, we need to look at what is popping in our lives.

Suggestion triggers can come from people warning us to be careful not to lift anything heavy or they may throw their back out.

Another trigger is the admonition. Steve says an admonition ignites pain when a person has been repeatedly warned to be careful of something they may previously have been unaware of. He knew a man who suffered severe hand pain after he attended a course on repetitive stress injuries and hand pain. Warnings of pain can bring on pain because it gives some people a focal point to hide within when he needs a mental diversion.

There also is what Steve calls the human compassion trigger. He knew a man who suffered from an extreme burning lung sensation and icy cold waves from his head to his toes, symptoms that are common when a person is under extreme tension. It all began when a co-worker asked how he felt and although he had felt okay, he suddenly began feeling a general weakness in his body. He dropped to his knees because he was afraid he would fall. Then the burning sensation began.

He spent two days in a hospital, and when he returned to work the co-worker again asked how he felt, and he felt the weakness and cold again, worse than before. It led to a panic attack. The man said the co-worker’s genuine concern for his health had triggered an emotional weight he felt upon himself. His symptoms passed when he talked with emergency room staff and found that a doctor’s caring ear were soothing and powerful healing mechanisms which “untriggered the trigger.” But what relieved the man’s pain was discovering his repressing his emotions. He was repressing something, holding back what he could not face.

Steve said there are other triggers that set off pain but “the king of triggers” may be the aging trigger which may visit us on our birthday as we grow older and think about losing our health or looks. He reminds us that Dr. Sarno listed six basic needs that make us angry and frustrate us if they are not adequately met. Number six on the list is “to be immortal, but we are unconsciously enraged by the inevitability of death.”

Steve relates the case of a man who had lost friends and acquaintances, and when he turned 70 it triggered thoughts of his own demise sometime in the future. He worried if the end could be a year away, a month, a week, a day, or an hour.

“He made the mistake of peeking into the future and not living in the moment,” Steve writes. “Not only does this prove that it is an error in thought alone that creates the imbalance in the mind body process, but it also gives great credence to (the baseball player) Satchel Paige’s question, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?"

Jack Benny, the comedian, never admitted to be older than 39, and lived decades after that.

The man who worried about his mortality was told he had severe spinal stenosis and needed immediate surgery, but he declined that. Eventually he recovered completely through TMS healing.

Dr. Sarno has said pain is a “cradle to grave” thing, but it is often a part of midlife crisis as family and friends pass away which can create separation rage. The are curious about a life beyond what they have.

Steve Ozanich quotes Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: “Among all my patients in the second half of life, that is to say over 35 years of age, there has not been one whose problem, in the last resort, was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.”

People need soothing answers, Steve says. “If they can’t find it in knowledge therapy or counselors, then they need to look more deeply within themselves for a spiritual awakening.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Mind-body healing can be faster and more complete and lasting when we add the spiritual element, especially if we are among those, as I am, of advancing years. I hardly ever thought about my mortality until I turned 80. Now I’m 83 and spending a lot more time awakening my spiritual side which has lain dormant in me for some years.

So triggers are with us all the time, and we have to look into our repressed emotions so as not to let them give us new pain. We need to be positive. Live in the moment. Find ways to make our moments as happy as we can.

Thank you, Steve Ozanich and Dr. Sarno for enlightening us about triggers and how to deal with them.

Satchel Paige was right about how we would feel if we didn't know how old we were. It's part of the meme process as we reflect what's around us, back to us. We see people age at certain rates and we respond in kind. Of course this is true for all kinds of TMS. I'm writing another article now for CNN on catching problems. We reflect our lives from those around us. It's very clear after talking to 1000s of people about TMS. I first heard of it when Dr. Sarno mentioned "in vogue" in HBP. One person starts the error and passes it to the next. Error is destroyed with truth.

A lot of aging really is in the mind and how we perceive it. Jack Benny may have repressed his age,
but it worked for him. Lately, I've been thinking I'm not 83 but 43 and feel a lot better about it.

Good luck with the CNN article.

I have so much to be grateful for, such as, this morning, not living in Boulder, Colorado.
Their flooding is terrible. Homes have been washed away. I have friends living there and
hope they and their home are safe.

So triggers are with us all the time, and we have to look into our repressed emotions so as not to let them give us new pain. We need to be positive. Live in the moment. Find ways to make our moments as happy as we can.

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This really resonated with me. We can't change the triggers themselves - we have no control over them (most of the time) - but we can alter how we react to them. Once we do that, in a sense we're redefining that event. It's no longer a trigger. It no longer has that power. It's just something that has happened, something that we've observed, something that's part of life. And I think Walt hit it right on the head - living in the moment and finding happiness wherever possible, whenever possible is one of the best ways to make triggers become not-triggers. There's a great thread on here called Ah, is this not happiness that focuses on just this. Every post there makes me smile. And I find there's such strength in a smile...

Reading this awesome thread by the ever-so-articulate Walt, I thought it would be a good idea to post the audio from the call-in discussion group's discussion of this chapter here, instead of on the original thread announcing the discussion group! As always, you can listen to the discussion right here using the audio player below, or you can download the audio as an mp3 by right-clicking on this link (or the link below the player) and choosing to save it to your computer. Happy listening!

I did notice that my first back attack occurred in November 2001 right after a handy man who used to fix things around my late mother's house told me how he was floored by lower back pain whenever he played a vigorous, aggressive sport like soccer. Sure, my pain came on after my mother's death and after I had lost a contract and money on the market, but I wonder whether the handy man's story about his periodic episodes of incapacitating back pain planted the seed in my mind? The other day I heard a guy asking a staff member at the gym I belong to, "How's your back doing?" You just have to wonder whether the gym worker's back pain flared up after that passing inquiry? Sounds like an example of Steve O's human compassion trigger. Edward Shorter in his From Paralysis to Fatigue seems to think that psychogenic symptoms have a life of their own and vary from generation to generation, so there are preferred symptoms like back pain that are going to change through the course of time. Dr. Sarno points out that before back pain, ulcers were in vogue. You have to wonder whether this whole sequence has to do with a kind of collective process of subconscious auto-suggestion within a larger social grouping? Are our unconscious minds always on the look out for suggested behaviors overheard in random conversations that occur around us all the time? A spooky, haunted world emerges once you accept the notion of the unconscious.

Yes, Bruce, I think we can develop pain by autosuggestion, and sometimes we create that.
My father suffered from back pain which years ago was called lumbago.
He said it came from being an automobile mechanic working under cars on concrete floors
in winter. I think it more likely came from TMS, stress from anxiety over money matters
during the Great 1930s Depression.

But I grew up with knowing about his lumbago and think I began sometime ago to
worry that I would inherit it. The back pain I suffered a year ago after lifting a case of
36 cans of beer at the supermarket could well have triggered worries about having lumbago.

Going through my repressed emotions I got rid of the back pain.

I guess we have to be careful about what we worry into our subconscious.

But I grew up with knowing about his lumbago and think I began sometime ago to
worry that I would inherit it.

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I think this is the same fallacy that leads to people looking for a common "alcoholic" or "addiction" gene in people from the same family who all seem to develop alcoholism or drug habits. True, there may be a genetic predisposition toward these behaviors, but nurture and environmental factors play a much more decisive role in how these predispositions will manifest. The nature-nurture debate goes on and on, I realize, like Pepsi versus Coke, but I don't think it's any accident that Dr Gabor Mate has observed that 100% of his female addict patients in Vancover B.C. were molested before their 10th birthday. Maybe some of them had an "alcoholic" or "addiction" gene, but not all of them. In the case of back pain running in families, I'd say it has to do with common tensions moving from generation to generation rather than an inherited "back pain" gene.

"Little pitchers have big ears!" Watch what you say around TMS patients. They may wind up imitating you.

Alcoholism and gambling both are very common in my family... both parents, brother, stepfather, uncles...
I thought it might be genetic, but refused to let either get a hold of me.
I just decided I wasn't going to go those destructive routes.
One beer, one glass of wine, or one Margarita is enough for me to feel a nice buzz.
No gambling, thanks, not even the lottery.

I am addicted, though... to watching a good old movie or a new one from the British or other foreign countries.
Not much from the U.S. but once in a while, I do find one of those.